


Round The Prickly Pear

by alientongue



Series: This Hollow Valley [2]
Category: Smile For Me (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Flowers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of parental abandonment, Pre-Relationship, Team Bonding, mentions of medical procedures, mentions of vomiting, mild body horror, minor original character death, peachblossom au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 12:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20506928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alientongue/pseuds/alientongue
Summary: The little girl in the backseat drums her feet against Habit’s own seat. “Where’re we going?”“The Habitat,” he says, and lets his eyes flicker from the twisting mountain road just long enough to smile into the rear view mirror. “I think you’ll like it theire! Lotts of nice, fresh air around, and plenty of space to play.” There’s a particularly thick patch of flowers ahead. He drifts into the next lane to pass it. “My friend Wallus lives there too.”She kicks his seat particularly hard and narrates it with aka-pow.“Is there lotsa sun? M’ flowers like sun.”Boris Habit begins to navigate the end of the world.





	Round The Prickly Pear

When Habit returns to the lobby, his patient insists on paying him double.

“Keep it,” Mrs. Coulro says, already fishing a face mask out of her faux-alligator purse. Everyone wears face masks these days; Habit can count on one hand the number of arrivals to his office willing to show their mouth for an instant, much less an examination, in the past week. That suits him well enough anyways. It’s difficult to practice dentistry without an assistant, or a janitor, or a receptionist, though the lattermost does mean there’s nobody to take note of the sizeable wad of hundred-dollar bills she’s pressed into his hand.

He thumbs the edges of it for a moment, flipping through more than he cares to count. “You’re sure, ma’am? This is cash.” Far, far more cash than anyone, particularly a frail old woman, makes a habit of carrying around in an absence of either law or enforcement.

Frail as she may be, Mrs. Coulro carries herself with the air of one accustomed to being listened to without question. It’s not an uncommon air among his more well-paying patients. “Of course it’s cash, doctor.” She titters, raising a thin, graying eyebrow. “What would you do with anything else in this economy?”

_Economy._ He chuckles politely at the joke, letting his fingers close around the bundle. “I guess I can’t very well visit the bank.”

Disposable mask hiding her nose and mouth, she adjusts the straps around her ears. “You can’t.” There’s a dusty splotch of pink on the sheet of foam where blush smears over it. “All closed, at this rate.” Fixing on his face in uncanny study, her eyes are a rheumy blue. “You’re a good man, Habit,” she says, “stock yourself up on the essentials. Food, water. Golf balls.” Her already-wrinkled face creases further at her own joke. “Goodness, imagine the shortage once production stops. We’ll need to abolish water traps.”

Habit is about to chuckle again before her attention strays from his face to his neck and the sound withers in his suddenly-dry throat. She doesn’t seem to notice. “And do look after your healing. A squamous carcinoma, was it?”

“Ah.” He’s holding his breath, he realizes, and tries to release it in a slow, subtle exhale. “Yes, ma’am. It was…” The memory drifts back to him just in time. “Further than it could have been. But not too far,” he says, stretching his lips into a smile as his hand rises to trace the bandages around his nape.

She nods sagely. “Always a relief. I’ve had a few myself, you know.” Evidently satisfied with the placement of her mask, she returns to rifling through her bag. “I know a dermatologist who should help, granted he’s still in his right mind. Let’s pray that he is.” She takes his other hand, this time, and slips a laminated business card between his fingers. Someone someone, M.D., from a neighboring town whose name he vaguely remembers having seen on the news when it still aired.

He pockets it and it nestles next to the rest of a small collection of cards useless at the end of the world. All plastic and crisp professional cardstock, they wouldn’t even make good kindling. “Thank you, ma’am.” The skin of his neck tingles coldly under gauze while the momentary adrenaline ebbs away.

Purse hung back over her stooped shoulder, Mrs. Coulro is turning to leave. “Take care,” she calls, “and pray too that none of those bloomers have crossed quarantine.”

It’s not a joke this time. Habit swallows, refuses to let himself reach for his bandages again no matter how the pressure of them itches. “Of course.”

She hobbles out the door and into the parking lot and there’s an excruciating minute before he hears a car door slam, a car engine start, car tires crunch loose gravel under their treads. The sound fades down the road. He reaches for his ponytail and unwinds the rubber band from it to let it spill down his back.

Today’s work is over, he decides. Closing now is easier than it’s ever been: no patients scheduled, no coworkers making small talk, no documentation to compile. He cleans his tools, tidies his workplace, and puts on his coat. His cloth face mask is swapped for foam and the doors are locked behind him.

Gas is difficult to come by as of late, and Habit has never lived far from his practice. With the streets as empty as they are, there’s no harm in walking home so long as he ensures today’s pay is tucked inconspicuously into one of the inside pockets of his coat.

Everything is so quiet. No chatter. No traffic. His footfalls are a steady one-two percussion to the rushing of the wind, accompanied now and again by birdsong. Leaves rustle in the overgrown boughs of the ornamental dogwoods lining the street.

A block away, someone screams.

He freezes on the edge of the curb. The same someone screams again, longer and louder this time, cadence like he could discern words any closer. Then it’s followed by—not a scream but a shout, sharper and gruffer, from a different voice. As the two begin to overlap they’re joined by more, more still, the rising murmur of a crowd.

The adrenaline is seeping back cold and sick into his stomach, and he’s a few steps behind his body in following the noise.

In front of a brick building, across an empty lot, past a chain-link fence, maybe two dozen people throng around the steps of an apartment building Habit doesn’t recognize. Three of them are at the center, one screaming, one shouting. One’s not making any noise at all, sitting on the pavement with their legs splayed out in front of them and their neck craned halfway to track the movement around them. That last one has their shirt worked down from their shoulders to bare soft, bright blossoms of color to the sun.

“No,” the first one is wailing, desperate and cracking. “No, no, no, my baby, don’t you _dare_—”

“Shut up,” the second one cuts in. “Just shut up, that’s not—that’s not your _baby_ anymore, not like this—”

The third one gives a high, questioning coo, glancing with detached interest between them.

Habit’s still cold. He’s still sick. He’s frozen, can’t move, can’t think, might throw up anyway.

First one makes the most horrible, bleeding noise of pain he’s ever heard and tries to throw themselves over the third, but there’s a brusque curse from one of the crowd and then they’re being pulled away. Another voice just barely carries. “Go, come on, just do it.”

“Fine,” the second one says, and raises the shape that’s been in their arms all this time.

It’s a shotgun.

* * *

According to his dashboard clock, it is 2:03 AM when Habit parks his car at the foot of the looming structure that is the Habitat.

He leaves the lights on when he cuts the engine and unbuckles his seatbelt: there are no lamps, exterior or otherwise, in the Habitat yet. There isn’t much of anything in it yet, really. He hadn’t anticipated full furnishing until at least another year, so he circles around to the trunk, lifts it open, and surveys what he has managed to bring.

Food and water, mostly. Stacks of cans, shrink-wrapped packs of plastic bottles. Next to it is a suitcase full of clothes, and next to that is a suitcase full of toiletries. Bunched in a sloppy roll underneath it all is an old, faded futon that still smells like the back of his closet. One buttoned pocket of his coat holds his wallet. The other holds his puppet.

It occurs to him that he’s forgotten his computer, but service has been down for weeks by now, and he doubts the Habitat’s generator will be running yet, so his desktop pet will have to wait. He chuckles weakly. Besides that, it’s not as if anyone will find him through his website. It’s not as if he could help them if he did.

He’s not hungry, and if he’s thirsty, he’s not enough so to be motivated to pry out a bottle. Right now he wants to sleep. Right now he wants to sleep for days on end. Even then, he stands staring dully into the trunk for a minute mustering the motivation to retrieve his futon, which will likely upend the entire pile once he does. In retrospect, he did not pack optimally.

As predicted, tugging the corner of the roll free brings several stacks of cans crashing down with it. The harsh, metallic noise of it makes Habit wince. It also makes a heavy figure stumble in the bushes behind him.

Panic clamps into him sharp and nauseating as he whirls around, recoiling so fast the backs of his knees hit the edge of the trunk and he nearly falls in. He can’t see, he didn’t—a _flashlight_, that’s what he forgot, never mind the computer. He’s alone at the top of a mountain in the middle of the night, unable to see beyond the dim yellow radius of his car’s dome lights, and his keys are still in hand but the seconds between himself and the driver’s side door stretch too far ahead of him. “Who’s there?”

The silhouette in the bushes, the negative space where shadows look more solid, is unmistakably human, but on closer inspection two large, round lenses glint buglike where eyes should be. _A monster_, instinct at the back of Habit’s head supplies, for an instant as horrifying as it is absurd.

Until a muffled, familiar voice sounds from the silhouette. “Doctor? Doctor Habit?”

Habit blinks, keys clutched so hard their edges have left aching grooves in the side of his index finger. “Wallus?”

Inching forward, the silhouette takes on form and color, no longer negative space but a tall, thickset man whose unruly hair leaks from under his gas mask. That last part is new, but then, Wallus had never much enjoyed showing his face anyway from what Habit could glean. “That’s me,” he says, and averts the tinted lenses of his mask as a blunt-nailed hand rises to worry the back of his neck. “Sorry to scare you, doc...just wanted to check who it was, you know?”

Habit sags, exhale shuddering out of him. It’s more convenient coincidence than intention that he falls back to sit on the lip of the trunk when his knees buckle. “Yuo’ve seen infected capeble of driving?”

Wallus shakes his head, half-matted curls bouncing around his shoulders. “Not them. They’re bad news, but they don’t mean any harm and they don’t make it past a locked door.” He jerks a thumb towards the Habitat’s main entrance, huge and shadowy in the dark, very definitively closed. “It’s the ones who aren’t infected that you need to watch out for. You know, the ones that think it’s every man for himself now, the ones that’ll pull a knife on you for the last case of water. The ones who’re going around shooting people in the streets.”

Tongue sticking stiff to the floor of his thinly-watering mouth, stomach lurching, throat tightening, Habit doubles over onto the ground.

Distantly, he’s aware of Wallus calling his name, but it doesn’t matter because all of his world right now is his palms braced against the dirt and his elbows wobbling and the acid in his throat churning, bubbling, while tears well reflexively in his eyes and his hair is being hastily gathered up and out of his face a split second before he vomits.

He breathes harshly, heavily, for a moment. His mouth burns. He can move his tongue again and it tastes like sick. A calloused hand rubs his back right between his shoulder blades, a smooth, steady up-down rhythm that only shakes a bit. “You alright, doc?”

A quiet, pitiful noise leaves him of its own accord. He should get up. He should get up but he’s so, so tired, and the wet in his eyes isn’t drying out.

Wallus’ arm loops around his shoulders. “C’mon,” he coaxes, beginning to stand. It takes Habit a moment to shift his weight off of his hands but Wallus pauses for all of that moment until they’re both straightening slowly upright. Though Habit has a good few inches over him, the soothing weight around his shoulders remains; he glances down and Wallus is on tiptoes.

What he intends as a laugh comes out as more of a snivel and his face burns unpleasantly. Habit’s cried in front of him before, yes, but never like this. Never so trembling and small.

His futon stands forgotten propped against the side of the trunk. Wallus motions to it. “You want me to help you get that set up inside?”

Habit wipes his face with the back of his coat sleeve. Washing the sweat and the sick and the mucus and the tears off of it will be a problem for his future self. He nods.

“Alright.” Wallus’ arm around him gives a parting squeeze and then pulls away as Wallus hoists the futon onto his shoulders, his free hand hovering over the two suitcases. “Which one should I bring in first, doc?”

No matter how he tries to steady his breath, it sniffles. “Dunno.”

“Which is which?”

Blearily, Habit turns to them and dredges his memory. “Lefft one’s clothes. Wright one’s...toothbrushes n’ things.”

Wallus brings the right one first.

* * *

The little girl in the backseat drums her feet against Habit’s own seat. “Where’re we going?”

“The Habitat,” he says, and lets his eyes flicker from the twisting mountain road just long enough to smile into the rear view mirror. “I think you’ll like it theire! Lotts of nice, fresh air around, and plenty of space to play.” There’s a particularly thick patch of flowers ahead. He drifts into the next lane to pass it. “My friend Wallus lives there too.”

She kicks his seat particularly hard and narrates it with a _ka-pow_. “Is there lotsa sun? M’ flowers like sun.”

The lane isn’t wide enough to miss the full berth of the patch. Something crunches wetly under the tires. “Why don’t u play with Masked Driver,” Habit suggests, meticulously following the dotted line down the middle of the road as he decides to breathe through his mouth for a minute.

“Huh? Oh.” Besides the girl, Habit had recovered a few things from the house in the foothills: a bottle of iodine, a can opener, a much-loved plastic action figure. The former two he secured in the glove compartment, the latter he seated in the backseat alongside her. “Don’t want to. I wanna go in the sun.”

“Mebbe later.” He checks the mirror again to see if she’s moved the action figure at all. She hasn’t. “Can you tell me about your-self? The things you like?”

Sticking her tongue out, she pouts, but starts anyways. “I’m Putunia, and I’m seven years old. I used to be a boring normal person but then I got my flower powers!” She puffs out her chest and waves her arms for emphasis, orange-yellow bursts of nasturtiums fluttering. A few tiny, unbloomed buds speckle her skin around their edges. “I like them a whole lot. Some people are jealous, though.”

Habit’s nails pick at the grain of the steering wheel. “Some people are jealus?”

“Uh-huh,” Putunia confirms. “Like my mom and dad. When I got my flowers they tried to pull them all out and yelled at me.” The seat protests faintly when she bounces on it. “But I was brave! I went in my room and locked the door, and I didn’t come out until they were gone. Except to be sneaky and get water a couple of times.”

“You are brave,” Habit says, heart constricted in his throat. “We’re here.”

After a moment of watching her fumble with the clasp of her seatbelt, Habit undoes it for her and barely manages to grab her hand before she can be off like a shot, or at least however much of a shot staggering allows. “Don’t forget Masked Driver,” he says, but she only tries to tug his hand along so he takes the action figure himself.

He knocks at the Habitat door, a low, metallic ringing under his knuckles.

It creaks open, and Putunia makes another attempt at dashing forwards. He allows himself to be guided into the courtyard this time, dragged towards the wall he’d painted a mural across last week, until heavier footsteps approach and he turns.

Putunia turns with him. “You look like a big hairy bug,” she observes.

“Oh,” Wallus says, quietly.

“Be nice, Putunia,” Habit chides, eyes on their hands clasped together rather than Wallus’ mask. His fingers curl all the way down to the bony knob of her wrist. “This is Wallus! My frend!” Patting her head, he strings a smile across his face. “Wuld you like to say hello to him?”

She swings their handhold pendulously back and forth, rocking from heels to toes. “Hello,” she says. “‘M Putunia. I’m seven years old, and I have flower powers.” Even abbreviated, her introduction is illustrated by a waggle of her free arm. Then she furrows her brow and peers at Wallus. “How come you smell weird? Like you don’t have flower powers.”

A bit too loudly, Habit chuckles. “Putunia! That’se not very nice. I can gua-ran-tee you he smells just fine.” He gives her hand a quick squeeze. “Did you know there’s a carnival in the Habitat? I bet you didn’t.” At her wide-eyed look, he points a finger towards the gate hanging ajar at the back of the courtyard and says, “How abowt you play there for a little while? You can see Martha! And the sun! And in juuust that little while…” He winks theatrically. “We’ll have a big surprise ready for you!”

Her eyes are very round and very intense. “Whassit gonna be?”

“It’s a surprize,” Habit repeats, beaming fit for any of the fluorescent lamps at his old office.

She studies him for a few seconds more before glancing back at the gate. “I’m goin’ in the sun,” she announces, and now Habit lets her tear free. He was right to hold her at first; she shuffles remarkably fast.

“Seven years old,” Wallus says, breath hissing at length from the filter of his gas mask. “God, doc. She’s really the first one you found?”

Habit watches her green-dress shape meander through the open dirt. His smile is making his cheeks cramp painfully. “No,” he says, because a lie won’t make him feel any better. “There were a few others. All older. But I couldn’t…” He grits his teeth, plasters his fingers across his face. “I didn’t know if it was going to work. What if they just die, or it hurts worse?”

Wallus’ footsteps trudge closer to bring him into Habit’s peripheral vision, a blot of dull, faceless color. “But what if she dies,” he says. “I’m no doctor, but I don’t think a kid makes it any easier.”

Lips pulling back from his rictus grin, Habit lets his fingers curl into his skin. “It doesn’t,” he says. “It doesn’t, it duzn’t—”

“Hey, hey, _hey_.” Wallus’ hand is on his shoulder. It’s swiveling him gently aside, pulling his eyes away from the tiny figure lying flat on the ground until he’s staring into tinted plastic lenses instead and Wallus’ other hand has shifted to match the first. “I’m not blaming you, doc. Boris.” He squeezes, steady solid pressure at either side of Habit’s collarbone. “We have to start somewhere, right? And you couldn’t just leave her there alone. Right?”

Inch by inch, Habit’s smile slackens. He inhales, deeply. “Right.”

“It’s going to be okay, Boris,” Wallus says. “You’ve got a good shot at helping her. Better than anyone else. Think about it—how many other doctors are you going to find these days? And how many of those doctors are going to be lucid enough to help? And how many of those doctors are going to have a whole shelter set up beforehand? You’re the man for the job here, right?”

A short, wheezing laugh huffs from Habit. “I woodn’t go that far.”

“C’mon.”

“...Right.”

* * *

The road up to Kamal’s apartment complex is swamped in flowers, ankle-deep. Improbable combinations overlap each other in defiance of shade and moisture: hieracium, poppies, lilies of the valley. After the human body, anything is possible, Habit supposes.

Wading to the front doors is a balancing act of watching the ground closely enough to avoid familiar shapes but not closely enough to notice the familiar shapes twitch and shudder. It’s successful, if only in the sense that Habit does make it to the top of the steps before he takes a moment to steady himself with his coat cinched tight around his torso.

Once he releases the buttoned seam, the doorway yawns half-open in front of him. One glass door is missing, torn off the hinges. The other is cracked, dirtied with dust and grease and smears of pollen. Beyond them, the lobby is lit only by shafts of light filtering through the windows, across overturned armchairs and coffee tables.

It hadn’t been far into the end of the world before Kamal had stopped coming to work. No warning, no dwindling visits—that Monday he worked his hours from the first minute to the last, that Tuesday he didn’t so much as show up. A better sign than if he had given warning, at least, more likely paranoia than infection. Well. For whatever measure a grounded fear can be called paranoia.

Employment records had given Habit his exact address, and whether he was supposed to have been privy to that information or not doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters now is that he looks from the empty pit of the elevator shaft to the stairwell and runs a mantra of _four-two-seven_ through his head as he settles a hand on the railing and begins to climb.

The stairs are concrete and the railings are metal, fortunately. Aside from paint flaking off underneath his fingertips, he’s in no danger of crashing through a rotted step, though at the first landing grimy tatters of an area rug come apart under his feet.

He continues on. At the second landing, there’s a thicket of morning glories climbing the wall, sinking their tendrils into the cracks of the floor. From halfway down, the edges of the third-floor stairs are streaked with dried, rusty brown.

He continues on. At the third landing, there’s a small window. The glass is knocked out of it and a warm, damp breeze ruffles Habit’s hair, smelling cloyingly of flowers and rot.

He continues on. At the fourth landing, Habit thinks _four-two-seven, fourth floor, next-to-last door on the right side of the hall_, and he stops, and he pushes open the door to the hallway proper.

Apartment 427 is locked. A spare room key might be in the lobby. A lockpick, however, is definitely in Habit’s pocket, and he prefers his odds there. His hands are still cumbersome, still too big to be fully dexterous yet, but the past few months have been good enough teachers that the lock _click_s obligingly before he can snap the pin.

Habit turns the knob and the door knocks into something heavy and wooden rather than opening. His brow furrows. Though he tries his palm, it’s only with his shoulder braced against the paneling that he can push his way past the makeshift barricade: a dresser dragged in front of the door. He’s jostled one drawer halfway open and it’s still full, packed with neatly-folded dress shirts. Scrubs, too, if he looks closer. He recognizes the lotus-print one on top.

With some difficulty, he swallows. The rest of the room is in lazy disarray, nothing torn, but couch cushions undone and pillows scattered around the coffee table. The curtains in front of the balcony have been pulled down. “Hello?”

Something rustles on the balcony outside. Clothing, stems. “Hello!”

Only the very edge of the balcony is obscured from this angle. There’s no time to prepare, no time to react, no time to brace himself: Habit’s skin crawls and stomach curdles and then Kamal is wobbling on his feet framed by the balcony doors, resplendent with clematis.

Habit steps back. Kamal steps forward. He doesn’t bother with the door handles, just leans his weight against one glass panel until it swings inwards and he stumbles inside. He’s smiling, broad and easy, and his teeth have that unbrushed sepia tint he’d admitted to Habit once that he hated. “Doc? Is, issat you?” His eyes focus on Habit through a dreamy glaze and a sickly yellow glint. “Yeah, that is you! Boris! Hi!”

“Kamal,” Habit says, the sound coming out odd. Choked. His body makes to recoil further but the backs of his legs bump against the open drawer. Distantly, he props one hand on the top of the dresser, and his fingers splay over something flat and glossy. When he shoots it a glance out of the corner of his eye, it’s a postcard; behind it is a stack of dozens more lined up in a shoebox. Neat, slanted writing announces it to be from _Ammaa & Abbuu_.

Shambling forwards, Kamal hasn’t stopped chattering, even if the words come out slurred. “Been f’rever since I’ve seen you. Or anybody. Jus’ the people from the balcony.” His shirt is half-ripped, yanked down from his shoulder to free purple-mauve blossoms and thin vines winding from his skin. They twine around his upper arm and burst in a brilliant cluster from his collarbone. “I missed you,” he says, and he’s close enough to reach out and grasp clumsily at the breast pocket of Habit’s coat.

Habit’s chest feels tight and raw and close to bursting. He stares into Kamal’s blissful face for a second longer and closes his eyes.

Still grasping his coat, Kamal presses closer, settling his cheek against Habit’s sternum with a tuneless hum.

Habit opens his eyes again and grins. Broad, bright. “I missed u too,” he says. “You did’nt tell me you got flouers while I was gone!” With his free hand, he pats Kamal’s shoulder. “They’re ver-y pretty!”

Kamal makes a high, happy noise at the contact and rises onto his tiptoes to nuzzle further against Habit. “Aren’t they?” His voice is a thick mumble. “Feel so nice. Wanna make ‘em even prettier. Sun ‘n water ‘n things.” He butts his forehead encouragingly into Habit’s ribs. “I bet your flowers ‘re pretty too, Boris.”

“Maybe,” Habit says, tone as sunny and sweet as he can pitch it. “But I know someplace that can helpe with making yuors prettier!”

Kamal _ooh_s. “Where?”

“The Habitat!” Habit’s hand slips between Kamal’s shoulder blades and strokes. “We’ll fix you right up. Promiss.”

Perfectly content, Kamal stretches into the attention with another coo.

* * *

“I’ve always wondered what this place looked like,” Kamal says, huddled with his arms around his knees in Habit’s desk chair.

There’s not much furniture in his office yet, so Habit had wheeled the chair over to the window. His desk will manage without it for the time being. “What do you think?”

Kamal is still shaky, still bandaged under his crisp newly-washed clothes, but he’s not wailing anymore, not trying to tear it all away from his healing incisions anymore. The incoherent nights have caught up to him, if his dark-ringed eyes are any indication. “It has personality,” he says, and shifts his weight to swivel the chair minutely side to side. “You did get the architects to sign onto this, right?”

Looking up from a clipboard of medicine administration records, Habit chuckles. “I can still spinn you, you know.” Everything is on track for today. Putunia will need a last supplement later, but that’s about it. He sets the clipboard down. “But I won’t, becus I’m nice.” From the base of his office, the entirety of the Habitat sprawls out below them in bright colors and peculiar shapes. “And I did.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” The chair swivels to a stop, angled slightly off-center with the window. Putunia’s faraway form is dyed orange by the glass as she bounces between makeshift carnival attractions. “Not like I can complain, I guess. You’re putting it to good use.”

No words rise in Habit’s throat, so he only straightens the chair to face forward again.

Kamal’s fingertips trace the stripes of his pants up and down along his calves. “I thought I was going to die,” he says. “I thought either I was going to wait the whole thing out, or I was going to die.” He tucks his chin below his kneecaps and his eyes are gold, not yellow. “Boris, I...you saved my life.”

“Had to,” Habit says lamely. He checks the chair again to ensure it’s adjusted right. “I didn’t want you to die.”

A sigh rattles out of Kamal as he nods. “Thank you.” He’s looking down, not at Putunia or much of anything. “You’re a good guy, doc.”

It might feel better if Kamal was looking at him. It might feel worse. Habit doesn’t know. “I have.” He doesn’t let himself white-knuckle the back of the chair. “Something I need to tell you.”

Now Kamal looks at him, wan face curious. Tentative. Habit doesn’t meet it. He feels—he’s stepped off an edge and can’t pull back as he plummets in slow motion, the expanse of the room opening up around him.

The words rise in his throat but they’re too heavy on his dry tongue. Kamal should remind him to speak, Kamal should prompt him forward, but past the curiosity in his expression is an awful quiet understanding and without a doubt if Habit doesn’t speak himself Kamal will turn away and pretend he had never wanted to.

For an absurd instant he wishes he had his puppet to speak for him. Then he swallows, inhales, and reaches for his hair where it curtains his no-longer-bandaged nape. He gathers it aside in one hand, fingers an impromptu ponytail clasp, and cranes his neck to bare the full soft arch of it.

He does not close his eyes. If he closes his eyes, he’ll have to open them again, and he would rather boil gradually under the dawning horror across Kamal’s face than all at once.

And the horror does dawn. By slow degrees, Kamal’s mouth slackens, eyes widen, cheeks blanch. He stares, from Habit’s neck to eyes to neck again. The dull, heavy, excruciating comfort of having been right sinks to the pit of Habit’s stomach like an anchor.

Helplessly, he smiles. “I’m sorry.”

“Boris,” Kamal ekes out, and shakes his head. “Oh, god, Boris…” His voice is soft and high, beginning to crack. “That wasn’t—you didn’t have a carcinoma, did you? You had flowers all along.”

“Bingo,” Habit says, and runs a hand through the petals of the tooth lilies blooming all down his nape.

Just as soft, just as high, cracking further than before, Kamal swears. He’s uncurled from himself, twisted on his knees with a hand gripping the chair’s armrest to face Habit. “All that time, you could’ve…” He presses the fingers of his free hand against his forehead. “I could’ve…”

“Could’ve been hurt,” Habit finishes.

“Could’ve _helped_,” Kamal says. “I know I’ve never done the procedures like you have, but—you need to show me how, I need to get those off of you—”

In spite of himself, there’s a lurching, prickling sense of _wrongwrongwrong_ from the thought alone, and Habit barely keeps himself from reeling back as he blinks. “Gett them off?”

The horror in Kamal’s expression is bubbling into a feverish anxiety. “Well, yeah,” he says. “With how long you’ve had them, who knows how long you have left.” His lips are a wobbling line. “Who knows how you’re even in your right mind.”

Habit winces, feeling abruptly very small. “They don’t hurt me.”

Kamal pauses. “They don’t?”

“No,” he tells the truth. “Itched a littel when they were growing, but.” A feeble shrug. “Never hurt. Even when every-body started dying.” He runs his hand through the petals again, the soft delicate petals brushing along his fingers and the fluting of stems underneath. “I don’t know.” The blossoms that warm him in sun and cool him in water, always so gently. “I don’t _know_.”

Shakily, Kamal rises to his feet, and his hand hovers gingerly over Habit’s own at his neck. He swears again. “You’re not overgrown, huh...not even a little.” When Habit uncovers the lilies his scrutiny is midday heat, toeing the uneasy line between pleasant and uncomfortable, marveling and gaping. His fingertips ghost faint, faint lines around the perimeter of the blooms. He doesn’t yank or tear, doesn’t even touch.

“Boris,” he says, and his voice is hushed, tinged with awe or horror or some mix of both, “have you ever heard of a symbiotic infection?”

**Author's Note:**

> this one came a little later than expected, sorry! hopefully the next work should be sooner.
> 
> as always, if you enjoyed the fic or would like to talk about the au, we have an open discord server [here](https://discord.gg/xqrDdYD)!


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